Do Moms live a severed life?

Musing on the inner conflict of containing multitudes in one corporeal body and mind

A few years ago I split up from the father of my kids, and abruptly found myself in new territory. In this new world, roughly 50% of the time (usually a little less) I had no obligations to anyone but myself.

As a person who aerosolized her coffee on the last individual that asked about my hobbies, this discovery of time was disconcerting. I had so thoroughly lost myself in motherhood, in trying to further my career, and yes, in hiding from cracks and fissures in my relationship, that I did not remember what it felt like to be an individual.

Honestly, two years out it’s still hard and a little foreign feeling. And I ask myself if I live a severed life.

Watching the characters in severance zip in and out of different personalities with the apparent ease of an elevator ride left me pondering why it was hard for me to move in and out of my different identities smoothly. I also wondered if my innie is the Mom or is my outie the Mom, and who is the person who is not “Mom”.

Do I want it to be easier? Easier to not miss my kids when they go to their Dad’s house. Easier to connect with myself when they aren’t with me. Is there something beautiful about it being hard. I love my kids with so much of my soul that even the friction and pain of hugging them on the mornings when they will go home to Dad is somehow meaningful.

And as much as I love them and miss their jokes, tantrums, hugs, and quirks when they are gone, I know that I sleep better, treat my body better, and read more when they are away. There is a deep visceral recognition of the value of this time. Something I didn’t and couldn’t fully recognize before I became a mother.

Sometimes I wish it was easier. But I remember that a wise therapist told me that love isn’t aesthetically beautiful, it feels beautiful because there is friction, there is work, there is transition.

Matriscence has entered our collective vocabulary and much has been made of the idea that women become something else when they become mothers. In popular culture shows like Night Bitch and Working Moms show us the ways that our lives our warped and upended by motherhood. And then again the culture tells us that we go through another transition later maybe as a result of motherhood or a long hibernation of our non-mother selves (see All Fours by Miranda July).

These cultural outposts show us big transitions, but I suppose I’m stuck in the muck of small transitions. Every other week when my kids switch houses, every night when I turn out their light and retreat to a vanishingly small window of time that is not dedicated to them. Every morning when I get dressed to go to work, and every evening when I return home.

I carve myself out of unmoving commitments to work, to schedules, to keeping the trains running on time. A thousand forms, ten thousand emails, 100 newsletters, and I am always perpetually behind. And all of this sounds grim because I really am on the fence about whether I have my shit together so to speak.

But I still try to carve myself out. I find meaning in all my commitments, and so they are part of me too. They claim my time and shape who I am, and yet I am constantly chipping away and smoothing the curves around my life. Trying to find space, to find some ease in constant change.

I suppose my life is the opposite of severed. Everything is all mixed up all the goddamn time.